MAry's Violet Eyes...

1993

This piece provokes a different sense of time, place, and environmental awareness while stimulating a poetic, playful experience. Mary's Violet Eyes... was an invitational site work located in Stanley Park, in Vancouver as part of the mega-exhibition Artropolis. It stems from two childhood memories: Burma Shave signs strung across the American Midwest landscape of endless cornfields, and the phrase I learned as a child to remember the planets in their order from the sun: Mary's (Mercury) Violet (Venus) Eyes (Earth) Made (Mars) John (Jupiter) Sit (Saturn) Up (Uranus) Nights (Neptune) Pining (Pluto). Nine truck tires, each painted with the name of a planet and corresponding text, were mounted on a steel hanger holding a graphic image of the planets; the texts described each planet’s mythology, data, and facts.